RelatioNet SH SH 31
SA RO
Shyndi
Shweemer
Holocaust Project Katzanelson High School 2017
Kfar
Saba, Israel
e-mail:
mayaazoulay52@gmail.com
kaufmanshahar@gmail.com
First name: Shyndi
Last name: Shweemer
City of birth: Satu-Mare
Country of birth: Romania
Satu-Mare
After Satu Mare was reannexed to Hungary
in 1940, the civil rights and economic activities of the Jews were restricted,
and in summer 1941, "foreign" Jews were deported to
Kamenets-Podolski, where they were murdered by Hungarian and German troops.
In 1944, the Jewish population was forced
into the Satu Mare ghetto.The majority of men were sent to forced labor
battalions, and the others were deported to the extermination camps in Poland,
where the majority of them was murdered by the Nazis. Six trains left Satu Mare for
Auschwitz-Birkenau starting May 19, 1944, each carrying approximately 3300
people. In total, 18,863 Jews were deported from Satu Mare, Carei and the
surrounding localities. Of these, 14,440 were killed.
Only a small number of the survivors
returned to Satu Mare after the war, but a number of Jews belonging to
culturally different groups from all parts of Romania settled in the city.
The majority of them later emigrated to Israel.
By 1970 the town’s Jewish population numbered 500, and in 2011, only 34 Jews
remained.
In 2004, a Holocaust memorial was
dedicated in the Decebal Street Synagogue's courtyard. Aside from the
synagogues, two Jewish cemeteries also remained.
Interview with Shyndi
Shweemer
"I was 13 when the Germans invaded
our town, the sanctions started and we had to wear the yellow patch.
We were a poor, but happy family. I had 2
older siblings, a sister 5 years older than me and a brother 10 years older. My
father was the sole breadwinner of the family and mother was a housewife. As a
child, I had only one Jewish friend and the rest of my friends were gentiles. I
never felt different among my friends for being a Jew.
My father had a Fascist friend whose
granddaughter was my best friend. When we had to evacuate our house, my father
left all our jewelry with his friend. When I returned after the war, he gave
them all back to me.When the Germans entered our village, my
father was wearing the medals he had got during World War I. Thanks to these
medals; we got special benefits no other Jewish family could get. For instance,
my father who was a shoemaker got the all the
.materials he needed in order to
continue working
When they took all the Jewish families,
we were allowed to stay in our house because we were privileged.
Unlike many others ghettos, ours was in
an open field. We were allowed to take only one set of extra clothes and
supplies for 2-3 days. When we arrived, we looked for sticks and improvised
some sort of a tent which became our "new home" for a month before we
were deported .
The reason we were deported with the rest
of the Jewish families and had to leave our home was that our new Nazi mayor
was assigned and he cancelled all our privileges.
The day of the transport arrived. We all
thought we were relocated to the east to work and contribute our share to the
war effort. We were told that the elderly would take care of the children while
the rest of us would work. It was the forth year of the war. There were 3
transports from our village. I was part of the second one. From the first
transport no one survived.
We were on the train for 3 days. They
crammed so many of us that there was room only to stand or sit. Some of the
people died on the way. My family was lucky to survive because my father's
friend managed to smuggle us a bundle of food before we got on the train.
We arrived at Birkenau on June 8th.
They were in a frenzy of killing as many
Jews as they could, that the Zonderkomando
couldn't keep up with the masses of corpses piling up in the
crematoriums. Therefore, they
.burned people in ditches they dug
I still remember to this day the
horrifying smell the moment they opened the wagons
and then the people with the striped
outfits arrived
They told us to line up in two separate
groups, women on one side and men on the other.
We were ordered to leave our belongings
and that later we
.would get them back
We started walking. My sister and I were
before my mother who was helping an old woman who couldn’t walk. The moment my
mother saw my father being taking away, she
.started crying
I can still hear her words:"what's
happening? Where are they taking them? When can we see them..?"
And then we saw him standing there erect
in his uniform. He said nothing, just moved his finger (him – Josef Mengale),
left, right, left, right. My sister and I were directed to the left, my mother
and the old lady – to the right.
The last words I remember my mother
saying to my sister "watch the girl". As a child, I simply could not
understand what was going on and why no one was doing anything or resisting.
We were walking in two silent lines. Each
was waiting for his verdict – who to life and who to the gas chambers. We were
standing there without realizing what was going on and where so many of us were
headed. We could not even figure what that stench was. No one imagined it was the
smell of burned bodies. There was one Polish inmate who did not stop screaming
the number 16. At first we did not understand what it meant, later we realized
he meant we should pretend we were 16 years old. Luckily, I was not asked about
my age. Had I been asked, I would have said 13, I was raised by parents never
to lie. Mengale was standing, smiling at us whistling some opera tunes while
motioning with his finger – left, right, left, right.
We got to the showers and we were ordered
to strip naked.
They told us to pay attention where we
were leaving our things, because we would later come back to take them. After
the shower, they gave us those striped clothes and shaved our heads. So many of
us were shy, since we had never stripped naked in public. There was a soldier
standing and whipping whoever was hesitant for even a second.
We were all crammed into a big empty
hall. We were there for three days, with no food. Then there was a line-up and
then they gave us some liquid they called "soup". During one of the
line-ups, there was a selection. I was holding my sister's hand so firmly, it
felt like my hand was melting in hers. Both of us were put on a train. The
journey to Riga was a long and excruciating one. Upon arriving to Riga, I was
separated from my sister. When asked who had a profession my sister pretended
she was a dental technician, so she could get us more food. That was the last
time I had ever seen my sister. I was left alone in the world after losing both
my parents just two weeks before that. I cried day and night, nothing to live
for anymore.
.A line up again
A shave again.
An empty space just like in Birkenau.
They chose 500 girls and we were taken up
to the mountains, where we had to cut trees and make our own huts and beds, we
got food once a day. After four weeks, we were sent back to Dudengham and then
– another selection. Here we had to do
other things; we had to empty ammunition
from warehouses before the red army arrived to the front. The Polish capo told
us that if we had worked efficiently,
they would have sent us back to our town. Once, I managed to sneak
another group which was supposed to be sent back to our town , but I was caught
by the capo. I was beaten almost to death by him, however, what hurt the most
were not the beatings, but the unthinkable fact that a Jew would be able to do
such a thing to another Jew.
The girls picked me up from the floor and
put me on the bed. Every day someone else brought me a ration of food until I
could stand on my feet again. After a while I was sent to Shtuthof in Germany
and from there to Gluven, where I was for 8 months. The conditions there were
better. We would get bread and tea every morning and soup when we came back
from work. Just across from our camp, there was a camp of the Hitleryugend.
Looking back I realize that during the whole time in the camp I was never
afraid, because I always felt I had nothing to lose, and no one to fight for.
I was 15 when I was liberated. On the day
of the liberation, a soldier gave me the most precious gift ever- a loaf of
bread.
After the liberation, I came back to my
home town. I married someone who was much older than me, and gave birth to 2
.girls. After divorcing him, I immigrated to Israel
No one here was interested in knowing
anything about what we had gone through. Many even asked in contempt:"How
come you didn’t resist? Why did you allow them to take you like sheep to the
slaughter?" How could they even begin to understand something I myself
couldn’t comprehend. That’s why I had to go back. It took me almost 40 years to
find the courage within me to go back there and maybe find the answer to those
questions asked decades ago. Stepping on the platform in Birkenau, triggered
back the sights, the smell, the screams and the finger indicating left, right.
But no answer to the question tormenting me to this day.
After several years in Israel I met my
current husband- Aba, whom I had known since we were both kids… and the rest is
history."
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